


Finding Forward

by Trobadora



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F, Post-Episode: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, Pre-Episode: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, The Vault (Doctor Who), piano trolling, timelines out of synch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-10 08:02:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12294855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trobadora/pseuds/Trobadora
Summary: "Forging blindly ahead is a well-honed strategy of mine," the Doctor admitted wryly. "I can do that any day. Now,forward? That's proven a bit more difficult, you see."





	Finding Forward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miss_Nearly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Nearly/gifts).



The Doctor sat with her back against the Vault door, staring down at her heavy boots. Blonde hair was falling into her face. Her fingers drummed against her knee. 

This wasn't wise. She knew it wasn't wise. She was doing it anyway.

 _Missy. You said you're my friend. I need your help._ Words she'd said before.

She'd thought she was done for, with the Cybermen. The Doctor had fallen, not expecting to get up. Regeneration had come as a surprise this time. She hadn't _wanted_ it, having to do it all over again. Fresh body, fresh self: turn around, find out who you are.

Again.

"Makes me tired just thinking about it," she muttered, her face pulling into a scowl. And, "Well, aren't I cheerful, this time round." 

What next? She'd already gone back, plucked Nardole and the other survivors from that doomed colony ship. No sign of Bill's body, and no sign of Missy and her previous self, either. All long gone, Bill into death and Missy into her past. 

What next, indeed. Moving forward, as always, yes, but ... "Where _is_ forward, that's the question."

The TARDIS, a few yards away, hummed comfort. The Doctor made a face at her. She poked at the transport balloons she'd brought, one-two-three, making them bob in the air. Stalling.

From inside the Vault, a piano began to sound. _Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me ..._

An invitation! Missy had realised there was someone outside her Vault, though she couldn't be sure who. The Doctor snorted a laugh, pushing to her feet. 

"All right. Let's steal ourselves a moment," she said, aiming for a grin. She threw a look toward the TARDIS. "Doesn't count if you steal it from yourself, right?"

The TARDIS didn't answer.

  


* * *

  


The Doctor poked her head inside as soon as the Vault door opened. Missy was sitting at the piano, but had stopped playing. Her pose was world-weary and bored, and her head was turned toward the door as if by accident, her eyelids half-lowered.

She wasn't fooling the Doctor, though: her attention had sharpened the moment she spied a blonde head rather than a grey one.

"Hi, Missy!" the Doctor said, offering her perkiest grin. She pushed all the way inside, pulling the balloons in last and waving them in Missy's general direction. The quantum fold chamber sealed itself behind her. "I hope you're hungry; I brought takeaway. Straight from that little shop on Beryllis Three."

They'd discovered a shared fondness for the place, during one of their conversations here, some time in the 1980s. 1986, it must have been - Missy's disconcerting mixture of glee, disdain and pitying superiority at the Chernobyl accident had been the same conversation, hadn't it? It had left a definite impression on the Doctor.

Missy rose from the piano stool like a snake uncoiling, closing the keylid as she moved. She skipped down the steps and came towards the Doctor with a dancer's gait, her eyes bright with speculation, taking in the sight in front of her - the Doctor herself, and the balloons she was holding. Missy leaned forward, peering into the Doctor's face, an expression eerily reminiscent of a twin look she'd been subjected to not so long ago. _The Doctor, tied to a chair. Two Masters, peering at him._

"Look at that," Missy murmured. "The delivery boy's grown into a delivery girl."

The Doctor pouted. "That's not my name. We've been through that, Missy." For an entire year, back in the nineties, Missy had addressed her - him - as nothing but 'delivery boy'. After a while it had driven the Doctor up the walls, which of course had been the point.

Missy's lips curled wide. "Delivery girl," she purred. " _Hello._ "

"Do I need to demand payment?" The Doctor made her grumpiest face, nose scrunched, furrows between her brows. Smiling on the inside. Damn; even this felt like coming home. "I'm not going to _deliver_ if you won't say my name." She'd seen Missy's covetous gaze fall on the transport balloons, after all.

Missy tilted her head this way, then that, like a bird. Then she lowered it, peering up at the Doctor. Not very far up, granted. Her blue eyes had a darkness beneath, a hypnotist's gaze. "Doctor," she breathed. Then she was suddenly several steps away, making an expansive gesture toward a pair of armchairs and a table. "Go on, deliver."

And the sense of stepping into her own past was overwhelming: repeating a familiar scene, following a long-established script. Which, of course, was exactly what the Doctor was doing. This wasn't her own timeline, not any more. And yet here she was.

_Foolish, Doctor, very foolish of you._

Missy, meanwhile, was biding her time: asking no questions, demanding no answers. It would almost have been easier if she'd put the Doctor on the spot right away. 

The Doctor shook her head wryly, blonde hair flying, and pushed the weightless takeaway balloons toward the table as directed. She popped them one by one, leaving three round hot-boxes behind. 

"If there's Qualla it's all mine," Missy declared, sitting down very primly, reaching for the first box.

"Of course there is," the Doctor said mildly, dropping into her usual chair. "You said it was your favourite."

Missy's blue eyes were sharp enough to cut the air, but she didn't call the Doctor out on pampering her, nor accused her of trying to bribe her. Instead, she turned her attention to the food with an eagerness that was so highly performative it had to be hiding real eagerness beneath. 

Two boxes of various Beryllian dishes; one with the crisp-like flakes that served for a side dish-cum-eating utensil on Beryllis: the selection seemed to meet Missy's approval.

 _Step one._ A step towards what? In the privacy of her own mind, the Doctor could admit she didn't know.

  


* * *

  


"Decided to join the sisterhood, then?" Missy asked casually, scooping up the last of the Qualla with a bluish crisp. Feeling the Doctor out after all.

She clearly did genuinely love Beryllian food, and had single-handedly demolished more than two thirds of what the Doctor had brought, glaring every time the Doctor took a bite of Qualla for herself. The Thelli and Rahh, she hadn't begrudged her so much.

The Doctor shrugged, popping some Thelli into her mouth, wishing she'd known this about Missy before. Wishing she'd known a lot of things earlier, mundane little details she hadn't learned until the Vault. 

And not enough of them, even then. It hadn't been Beryllian, back when she'd been grey-haired and Scottish and a university professor. The Doctor would have had to admit he was leaving Earth, and he wasn't supposed to, after all. He was supposed to be guarding the Vault.

"I suppose it was time for an upgrade." Missy eyed the Doctor through narrowed eyes. "Pity about the eyebrows, though. And the hair. You've always pulled off grey better than blond."

The Doctor grinned through her wistfulness. "Try, try again, I always say. Do better second time round." 

Between swallowing one bite and reaching for the next, Missy mimed an exaggerated scowl. A bit too on the nose, then. Been there, done that.

"And I didn't decide," the Doctor continued, refusing Missy's description of her change. "You know I never do." She'd never had that much control over her regeneration, unlike some Time Lords. Though, come to think of it, she had no idea about the circumstances behind Missy's regeneration. Had _she_ chosen this? "Did you?"

"It's all a bit fuzzy, I'm afraid," Missy said with a grand gesture, like admitting a great flaw of character. "But on balance I'd have to say, probably no."

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully, stuffing more Rahh into her mouth to buy time. Missy couldn't know, but to her the fuzziness indicated clearly that Missy had still been within the temporal tangle of her encounter with her former self at the time of her regeneration. How long had these two stayed together? Were they still, in the Doctor's own timeline? She hoped not. She hoped Missy hadn't let herself be drawn too deeply back into her old way of life. 

"Your last self didn't seem too fond of ..." The Doctor trailed off, unsure how to end the sentence without giving something away. No, the Master's previous incarnation hadn't been too pleased by the idea of turning into _this_ version, had he? Though they'd both been delighted enough with each other at the same time.

And they _had_ walked away together. Possibly the Master had changed his mind, by the end. 

"Women?" Missy asked drily, coming up with her own ending for the Doctor's sentence. "I _was_ a bit silly, sometimes, wasn't I?" She sounded amused, more than anything.

"Silly, yes," the Doctor said drily. "That's the right term, I'm sure."

"Oh, don't go lecturing now. I don't think you're a professor any more."

The Doctor smirked. "Wonder what they'd say if I just went back to work?" Not _now_ , of course, but later. After her previous self had left for the last time. Not that that was too far in the future.

Moments away, and an eternity apart. This was her past; she knew it. What good could it possibly do, coming here? This quantum fold chamber was a place out of time; there was no telling - never would be any telling - whether anything that happened here mattered in the real world. She'd never been able to tell whether any of it was even real. Whether Missy had truly changed, even if only a little bit. 

The truth had never been here, inside the Vault. Why had she come looking for it here? 

But she _missed_ Missy, damn it all. 

"So, did you regenerate? Present-you, I mean, obviously, not you-you. Or are you just sneaking into your own timeline now?" Missy widened her eyes in comical enquiry.

The Doctor made a face. "You can sense it, can't you."

Missy very probably could tell. Time Lords often could, if they bothered to pay attention, and the Master had always been far better at that sort of psychic trick than the Doctor.

Missy nodded thoughtfully. "Naughty girl. I think I like."

"You would." Had that come out accusing or fond? The Doctor wasn't sure.

Apparently Missy couldn't tell for certain, either, because she changed the subject rather than needling her more. "Are you between pets, then? Feeling lonely? Is that why you're here?"

"Don't call them pets. How many times ..." The Doctor sighed, shaking her head. "I _know_ you're doing it to get a rise out of me, and yes, damn it, it's still working. Can you give it a rest?"

Missy's blue eyes narrowed as she examined the Doctor's face. "Lost someone again, haven't you." At the Doctor's glare, she relented. "Make it worth my while, then," she suggested sweetly.

"Well," said the Doctor, leaning back in her chair, "you've already got the piano, and I'm not getting you a particle accelerator. Or a pony, the poor thing would be miserable in here. But I did bring you Beryllian."

"My hero." Missy clutched her hands to her heart. "I have seen the light! I'll immediately give up _all_ my evil ways."

The Doctor scowled. Who was being too on the nose now? "Will you?" she asked, seriously.

Missy rolled her eyes, exasperated, gesturing at the space of the Vault around them. "I _have._ " Then, rapid-fire, "Who did you lose?"

"Does it matter? To you?"

"Not really," Missy admitted, clearly truthfully. "They never last, even the ones who don't die. You know why."

"Do tell," the Doctor snapped. "Why do _you_ think?"

Another expressive eyeroll. "Because they're human! Or Trakenite, or whatever. Point is, they're not Time Lords. They're not like us. Look at them." She jerked her head towards the Vault door. "Your friend the egg-headed one, he clearly respects you. But he doesn't understand what you're doing here at all."

"With you."

"With me." She smiled, her eyes far away. "It's where you should be. Our timelines are wound together; we're parts of a whole, you and I."

"For better or worse," the Doctor agreed, and stopped before she could add, _Mostly worse. Too often, for worse. Except, possibly, now._

The thought hurt, had always hurt. She held it tightly to her hearts anyway.

For once, Missy didn't seem to pick up on the direction of the Doctor's mind. "Till death do us part?" she responded, drily. "Don't be silly, we've done that. It never sticks." She sat up abruptly, straightening her spine, her eyes narrowing at the Doctor. "Wait, am I dead again?" she asked abruptly, dismayed. "Is that why you're here?" 

"What? No!" The words were out before the Doctor could hold them back, before conscious considerations could come into play. She mock-glared at Missy, not too pleased with the implications of Missy's speculation. 

"No," Missy repeated, mocking her. "Of course not; death is for other people. _Regeneration cycles_ are for other people; we've both done that, too." 

"Didn't think I would, this time," the Doctor admitted.

"Really? Do tell; this should be good." Missy propped her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, widened her eyes in exaggerated expectation. "Or not!" She sat back again, lifting her hands as if fending something off. "You never think you will, lately. Oh no, my regeneration cycle's run out! Oh no, let me send out my confession dial, just for added drama! Oh no, _this_ time it's going to be for real! But it never is, is it."

The Doctor bristled. "Stop it."

"Fine, fine." Missy waved a dismissive hand. "Do continue if you must. But first, tell me: _is_ that why you're here?" 

"Don't be ridiculous. You don't have to be dead for me to visit you."

Missy's mouth turned sour, and she turned away. "If you say so."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Affronted.

"You know what it means," Missy snapped. "Don't be obtuse; we both know how it goes. I find you, you don't find me."

Defensively, "That's not -"

Missy folded her arms over her chest. "Don't bother denying it, you silly cow, I know you. Am I right, or am I right?"

She was beautiful, and dangerous, and she was right. A terrifying combination, and not one the Doctor had ever known what to do with. 

"Have you considered that maybe that's because of what I tend to find when I find you?" Damn it, the Doctor hadn't come here for this argument. Or any argument.

But she _had_ come here for truths, for a hint that could help her decide where _forward_ might lie. She'd better listen to Missy's truths, distorted though they might be.

Missy snorted. "If _you_ tried to set up a meeting for once, you could control the circumstances. Well, a little bit, anyway." She showed just how little with her thumb and forefinger. "Little bit more than otherwise, anyway. But you don't. You never do." She scowled. "Except for here."

The Doctor sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know!" Missy grabbed an empty Qualla bowl and flung it across the Vault with force. It clanged against the wall, skipped several times on the floor, and finally came to rest against the screen hiding the bed. "I want my friend back. You know that's why I'm here. Why I bother. But you? What do you want?" Her voice broke a little on the last word, and she shook her head. Her eyes were gleaming with anger, wet with emotion.

"Missy." The Doctor leaned across the table, holding out her hands.

"Don't." Missy turned her face away. "You want another little pet, kept in a cage. Someone you can play with for a bit, then lock the door again. That's not a friend, Doctor. Haven't you learned that by now?"

Was this real? Could it be real? The Doctor didn't know, would never know for sure. Besides, Missy was fully capable of manipulating her with the truth. Real didn't mean it was the point.

"Missy. Listen." The Doctor rose on the balls of her feet to reach out over the table, pulled Missy's hand from her lap. Missy let her. She sat back down, hands closed around Missy's, holding on. Squeezing. "Missy, I want my friend back. And I'm very afraid that I can't have that. But I _want_. You know I want."

Missy's eyes were on her, intent, narrowed. "Not enough."

"Will you just ..." The Doctor let go of Missy's hand, throwing her own into the air. "We've done this for seventy years, in your timeline. Why now?"

Missy only glared at her. The answer was obvious, anyway: because _this_ version of the Doctor wasn't from her own timeline. Because she was getting a glimpse of the Doctor's future, and therefore her own. Because she didn't like what she was seeing - didn't like being stuck in a loop any more than the Doctor had.

Forward: a shared goal. 

The Doctor sighed, meeting Missy's glare head-on. "I know it's hard. It's hard for both of us. You've been trying. I know you've made progress. Will you just trust me a little more?"

She'd said too much, or perhaps just enough: Missy's expression froze for an instant. "Something's about to happen, is it."

The Doctor made a face. "Lots of somethings. But that's not -" She shook her head. "You don't know if this is worth it? I don't know either. But we're still here."

Stuck, perhaps. But still looking. Still trying.

Missy sat back abruptly, then rose, strode over to the piano and shoved the keylid up. She crashed her palm onto the keys, a horrible, nerve-jangling noise. Then she sat down and began to play, furiously, eyes clenched closed, an angry riff on a familiar tune: _I can't decide whether you should live or die ..._

The Doctor flinched. A deliberate call-back. Meant to hurt.

That year on the _Valiant_ had been hell. The Master had kept the Doctor prisoner for a year, forcing him to watch his favourite planet being destroyed piece by piece, his favourite humans killed or tortured, or both, one by one. Gloating about it every day.

And the worst of it was that the Doctor had still, despite everything, been so _glad_ the Master was alive, that he wasn't alone. Because despite everything, he'd still wanted his friend back.

She'd always wanted. Whatever that made her, she wasn't sure. _The Doctor_ , probably. It was the Master who had forced things between them to the point where there was only death or destruction, or death _and_ destruction, every time.

Was this going anywhere? Could it go anywhere? If they both wanted, did that make the slightest bit of difference at all?

Eventually, when Missy's angry abuse of the piano keys was starting to relent, the Doctor pushed herself out of her armchair. Missy didn't open her eyes, even when the Doctor climbed the stairs of the platform. 

She stood behind Missy, put her hands on Missy's shoulders. "I want my friend back," she said quietly, heartfelt, sincere. _Missy, please. Give me something._

Missy shoulders twitched briefly under the Doctor's hands. Her fingers stilled on the keys, dropping the song in the middle of a phrase. "Is that why you imitated me?" she asked waspishly, jerking her head backwards towards the Doctor, an effort to gloss over the emotion she'd betrayed. "Regenerating and all."

"Nope," the Doctor said. "Wanted that before I regenerated, you know that. You know. I wouldn't have done _this_ if I didn't. Neither of us would."

Missy didn't react.

A corner of the Doctor's mouth turned down, wry and tired. Were they going anywhere? _Could_ they go anywhere, or only ever round in circles? She didn't know. There were no answers here.

And Missy was still not responding.

The words rushed out of her. "Wonder if it's worth it, that's up to you. Doubt my judgment, doubt your own - all fair enough. But never doubt that I _want_ it. You know better than that."

She hadn't come here to plead with the Master. She was doing it anyway.

Now, finally, Missy turned on the piano bench, looking up over her right shoulder. "Third time's the charm," she said, inexplicably. And, "The bird in the cage has flown, hasn't she," all matter-of-fact.

The Doctor flinched, abruptly pulling her hands from Missy's shoulders. "Not ... quite," she said slowly. 

Then she caught on. _Oh. Third guess why the Doctor was here._ What had the other two been? Between companions - yes, essentially true. Missy dead - no, not as far as she knew. And third, Missy gone - yes again, though not in the way she'd implied. Two out of three; not bad.

"You're visiting me here, now, because you can't in your own timeline."

"Perhaps I can," the Doctor said, contrary as a matter of principle. "Perhaps there's another reason."

"Perhaps," Missy echoed, mocking. "Something's bothering you. Something you can't figure out. What did I do?"

Too perceptive by half, damn the Master. They knew each other too well. What _had_ Missy done? The problem was, she didn't know. 

"I'm a fool," the Doctor said bleakly, her eyes avoiding Missy's face. 

"Yes, you are," Missy agreed, with entirely too much gusto. There was a smile in her voice now. A small one. "You're talking to the wrong Master. And you know it."

"Well, you got angry at the wrong Doctor," the Doctor returned. 

Missy shrugged. "You made a convenient target." A sharp smirk. "You always do."

"Wish you'd leave it at that."

Missy nodded, mock-thoughtfully. "I hurt the pet, didn't I?"

"No." The Doctor scowled. That was a lie, of course. Yes, damn it, the Master had. What he'd done to Bill was horrifying. But that had been before the Vault, and it wasn't anywhere near the point. "Spoilers, Missy."

"You've forgiven me worse. Or pretended to, anyway." Missy's eyes were sharp, looking for something.

"Never pretended." The Doctor's hands, almost against her conscious will, twitched towards Missy. She clenched them into fists, pulled them down at her sides. "Never forgiven, either, maybe. I don't know. How can I? What you did to me, that's between us, but everything else -" She broke off. They'd had this conversation before, would have it again, countless times. 

"What then?" Missy asked. Her gaze was heavy, inescapable. "I am who I am, Doctor. And no matter how much I change, I did what I did."

"I can't forgive you on behalf of other people." The corners of Doctor's mouth turned down. "You don't want forgiveness, anyway. You don't care."

"And do you care?" Missy asked, almost gently. A predator's gentleness, a cat's claw just nudging a mouse before the real strike.

"The least I can do is care." The Doctor swallowed. "I don't know where to go from here," she admitted, finally. "If we could move forward - but I don't even know where that is, any more."

And whatever the hell it was she'd hoped to gain from this visit, she was no closer to it now than she'd been at the start.

 _Hoped._ It always came back to hope, didn't it? Hope, hope, hope. Hadn't she said it to Missy herself, that that would be worse? Losing the battle against hope.

Missy had walked away, in the end, and the Doctor was still hoping.

Missy's face froze for a microsecond: a little bit too much honesty for her? But then she pushed to her feet and turned around, leaning towards her, peering into the Doctor's face. Her hand reached out, smoothing a strand of blonde hair behind the Doctor's ear in a mockery of tenderness.

"Poor dear," Missy said drily, standing up straight again. The skin around her eyes crinkled just a little in a hint of a smile. "Have you been missing little old me?"

"Always." Bluntly. Honestly. _Even at your worst, Missy. Mistress. Master. Always._

And damn it all, of course Missy could see exactly what the Doctor meant, could see all of it hovering behind her eyes, darkening her face.

"So that's why you're stealing into your own timeline now, dragging out your past." She stepped around the stool, took the Doctor's hand and pulled her down the stairs. 

The Doctor let her, and a moment later she was being pulled into a twirl, then another, a music-less dance to an inaudible beat. Moving in circles. Wasn't that what they always did? What they'd always done? And yes, damn it, she'd done that before, dragging out an inevitable good-bye with the help of the TARDIS. If it had made things easier, she couldn't tell. 

Still, the Doctor went along with it now, let Missy lead the dance.

When Missy's fingers, inevitably, sneaked into Doctor's pocket, reaching for her sonic screwdriver, the Doctor's hand closed around hers. No surprise, to either of them. They grinned at each other.

Another turn around the piano platform: another stolen moment, out of time. Taken from a timeline no longer hers, a life that belonged to her previous self. A moment worth having, perhaps, but not an answer, not to any of the Doctor's questions. There were none here.

There was no future here.

She could sneak in for a visit; she'd still have to live in her own future. A future where Missy had walked away from her, had gone off with her worst self instead.

The question was why. Would she have done the same, had the alternative been something more promising than a futile death in defence of people who were already doomed? When one's only survival was one's worst self, people far better than the Master had given in, and lived to not regret it much at all.

Eventually the dance ended where it had started, at the foot of the piano platform. Missy let go of the Doctor and stepped up, sat on the stool again, playing out another melody: _Star Trekkin' across the universe ..._

The Doctor's eyes narrowed at the apparent non sequitur, but then she remembered the relevant lyrics: _Boldly going forward 'cause we can't find reverse._

She laughed out loud. Of course Missy had honed in on the real question, right away. She was the Master. For all their differences, she understood. "You're a regular jukebox, you are."

"Wrong decade, dear," Missy retorted, stopping after another repeat of the chorus. "It's your favourite planet; you should know."

"You know," the Doctor commented, knowing she was stalling, "for someone who claims she doesn't like it, you know an awful lot about Earth."

Missy's grin showed a great number of teeth. "The better to eat it with, Doctor." She tilted her head to the side. "Is that really why you came here?"

"Forging blindly ahead is a well-honed strategy of mine," the Doctor admitted wryly. "I can do that any day. Now, _forward_? That's proven a bit more difficult, you see."

Hope was devastating and inescapable. She and Missy had come so close to finding _forward_ , and it might still be out there for them. She didn't know. She hadn't the slightest idea where to find it.

Missy stood up again, came down towards her, slowly. "Forward's wherever you choose to move," she said gently, stopping directly in front of the Doctor, lifting a hand towards her face. "But you've still got to choose." Her fingertips brushed over the Doctor's cheek. Then she shrugged, snorted. "Or you can just go blindly, yes, that's always an option."

Leave their next meeting to chance, as she'd always done before. Missy had been right about that, too, damn it. She was a coward.

They were standing close, so close. She studied Missy's face. She'd never been able to see through the Master's schemes reliably enough to let herself trust. But what was the point of all this, without trust?

"I don't want to," the Doctor admitted, her hands finding Missy's shoulders again. She leaned closer. "Not this time."

"What do you want?" Missy asked, her breath warm and real on the Doctor's lips.

The Doctor answered by closing the last of the distance between them. The tingle she felt the instant their mouths touched was a warning: artron energy and timelines in misalignment, humming through their skin. But the Doctor had never thought much of staying away from dangerous things. 

The first kiss was slow - not tentative or careful, merely drawn out, a moment stretched as far as it would bear. The second was deeper, their hands clutching at each other, bodies seeking each other's warmth. Missy's teeth nipped the Doctor's lip; the Doctor dragged her own teeth over Missy's tongue in retaliation, feeling like a traitor.

More, more, for as long as it could last.

Suddenly Missy pulled away and let out a huge yawn, patting at her mouth with her sleeve. She blinked, drowsily - then, abruptly, her eyes snapped wide open, and she was struggling against the sleepiness. "You drugged me!"

"Yes," the Doctor said regretfully, not bothering with pretence. "Had to. I'm not getting us into a predestination paradox." 

Another yawn. "I was wondering."

"I'm sorry." 

"No, you're not." Missy could barely keep her eyes open, but she was _delighted_. She blinked rapidly, fighting against the drug and failing. "Retcon in your lip balm. Clever."

"Learned that from my wife." 

Of course Retcon: that drug was not very kind on the brain, if used in excess, but of the reliable options for removing memories, it was still the most harmless. 

The Doctor watched as Missy's eyes slipped closed, inevitability tugging at her hearts. She caught Missy as she lost the battle against the drug, lifted her in her arms and carried her over to her bed.

 _Own your hope, Doctor. Two thousand years, and you've never yet let it go. You're not about to learn now._

She pressed another kiss against Missy's slack lips. "I _am_ sorry, you know. But I'll see you soon."

  


* * *

  


The next day saw the Doctor hurtling through the Vortex in her TARDIS, fast on the track of a Time Lady who had vanished from a Mondasian colony ship a very short time ago.

And in the Vault, many centuries past, Missy woke up feeling very well rested, to no traces of the visit she couldn't remember, with nothing but the inexplicable aftertaste of Qualla on her tongue.

The Doctor was moving forward, into a future where Missy was somewhere out there, doing _something_ ; a future where she'd have to find out just what that something was. The Doctor was coming for the Master. She was going to find Missy again. And this time, she'd find out for certain, for real. For good.

Perhaps she'd find only pain and death and disaster. But perhaps, just perhaps, not. 

"No Vaults, no safety nets," the Doctor muttered to herself, holding on to the console as the TARDIS shook through her materialisation sequence. "Who are you, Missy? Who are _we?_ "

At the very least, this much she was sure of: Missy wanted to be found.


End file.
